Select range in contenteditable div

angry kiwi picture angry kiwi · Sep 22, 2010 · Viewed 28.4k times · Source

I've got a contenteditable div and a few paragraphs in it.

Here's my code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="main" contenteditable="true" 
             style="border:solid 1px black; width:300px; height:300px">
            <div>Hello world!</div>
            <div>
                <br>
            </div>
            <div>This is a paragraph</div>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Assuming, I want to make a range selection which will contain the string "world! This is"

How to do that?

Answer

Tim Down picture Tim Down · Sep 22, 2010

Once you've got hold of the text nodes containing the text you want highlighted, it's easy. How you get those depends on how generic you need this to be. As it is at the moment, before the user has edited it, the following will work:

var mainDiv = document.getElementById("main");
var startNode = mainDiv.firstChild.firstChild;
var endNode = mainDiv.childNodes[2].firstChild;

var range = document.createRange();
range.setStart(startNode, 6); // 6 is the offset of "world" within "Hello world"
range.setEnd(endNode, 7); // 7 is the length of "this is"
var sel = window.getSelection();
sel.removeAllRanges();
sel.addRange(range);